‘Jack…’
He looked up, and there was something almost tragic about his face. ‘Don’t worry about me, Tosh. The apples are just a symptom of what’s to come. I’ve seen the future, and it all looks and tastes the same.’ The shadow passed, and he was the same old Jack that she had known ever since he tracked her down in London and asked her to join Torchwood. ‘Sorry. Just me being stupid. Let me know if Owen turns up.’ It was a dismissal, of sorts, and Toshiko turned to go. As she did so, Jack reached out, picked up the first apple in the line and took a bite out of it with a crisp crunch. ‘Lemony,’ he said.
Toshiko returned to her work station. She sat down just as Jack bit into another apple. ‘Sweet, juicy, touch of mango.’
Filtering out the sounds of crunching from the office, Toshiko turned back to the screens. The first was showing the progress of the various viruses and worms she’d let loose on the Internet to create an electronic trail for Marianne Till, showing that she’d headed out for Ibiza when she was actually in the cells within Torchwood. It was basic work, and Toshiko didn’t have to pay much attention to it after she’d started it off.
The second screen was just an array of flickering numbers. It was the raw processing of the ultrasound scans that Owen had completed on Marianne; data being filtered, filleted, massaged and stitched together into a coherent whole. It was taking time, but it looked like it was going to produce a useful set of pictures.
The third screen was the one that was taking most of her attention. It had nothing to do with Marianne Till, nothing to do with dead Weevils and nothing to do with sudden and spontaneous attacks of hunger. It was the interior of one of the almost biological alien devices that Toshiko had discovered, with Ianto’s help, in the Torchwood Archive; sibling to the one that the Torchwood team had found at the scene of the deaths in the Cardiff nightclub.
The device was sitting quietly on the desk, focus of a number of sensors. It looked something like an over-inflated clover leaf: three rounded lobes about the size of an orange, but flattened, joined together, with a stalk hanging beneath the point where the lobes met. The stalk looked to Toshiko like a handle of some kind, giving her some more clues as to the size and shape of the hands that might have held it. Assuming it was a handle, and assuming that it fitted her hand in roughly the same way as it would the alien user, then one of the lobes would either project or receive energy of some kind, while the others might contain processing hardware, or energy cells, or something else.
Based on a cursory examination of the device, Toshiko had a theory that it projected an electrical charge at short-to-medium range. The device contained something like a low-power laser which, she suspected, was designed to ionise the air along a straight line. An electrical charge would then be projected along the ionised air, shocking anything at the far end. Perhaps it was a weapon, perhaps it was a sex toy; Toshiko wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure she cared, either. What intrigued her at the moment was the suspicion that the device contained another hidden picture.
The image on the screen was similar to the one that Toshiko had generated from the interior of the other device: a patchwork of various images in different colours, all overlaid on top of one another. A line moved slowly down the screen, marking the point where her software was progressively refining the resolution of the picture by processing scans lasting many minutes. So far it was just a clash of colours with some indications of an underlying structure, a bit like an overhead photograph of a field where the shape of an old settlement could still be seen in the contours of the land, even though the stones themselves had long been buried. The circuits were there, but she would have to puzzle them out, tease out their edges, their connections, their mountings. But, like the previous device, she got tantalising hints of a picture behind the picture, an image that wasn’t the circuit but was built from parts of the circuit.
And now, if she half-closed her eyes and let the pictures from the screen refract in rainbow shards from her long eyelashes, she could just about make it out. She could feel the strain in the muscles of her eyes, and her head began to ache as if a spike was being driven into her temples, but it was there.
A face, wider than it was high, with what might have been bulbous eyes at each end and a vertical slit of a mouth in the centre. But the image was slightly different. The head seemed to droop down at the ends, leaving the eyes hanging, and there were folds around the mouth.
It was older, but it was still the same alien face she had seen before.
Which meant that the devices were something more than just devices. They had a meaning over and above what they actually did.
But what the hell was it?
TWELVE
The Outpatients department of Cardiff Royal Infirmary was full of people. They sat there, arms folded, looking like they wished they had brought something to read with them. Magazines were scattered around, but they were all months out of date. Half of them were car magazines, the other half dishing the dirt on celebrity lifestyles. People would pick them up, glance at a page or two, then put them down again with a sigh.
Gwen wished she’d thought to bring her John Updike book with her. It was sitting beside the bed, cracked open to the page where she’d finished a chapter. She’d been trying to get back to it for a couple of months now — long enough that she couldn’t quite remember how it had started or who some of the characters were — but life and Torchwood kept getting in the way. She could have scooped it up as she and Rhys left the flat, but she had bigger things on her mind. Like the trail of blood that Rhys was leaving behind him all the way to the car.
Rhys was reading a Dean Koontz novel. He’d read all of Dean Koontz’s novels, and still kept them in the flat, even though he wasn’t likely to read them again. Gwen had tried to read one, once, just to please Rhys, but she couldn’t get past the first paragraph. At the time she’d thought the horror-based plots in which innocent people were menaced by dark forces beyond their comprehension too outlandish for words.
Now she thought them too tame. Funny thing, life.
She’d texted Jack with an update on the situation, and she hoped that they’d be out scouring Cardiff for Lucy. Looking around, she couldn’t help but notice that most of the people in Outpatients didn’t look as if they were injured. Rhys was definitely the person there with the most blood on him. A few were sneezing, and one woman had a rash of small red spots across her arms and face. There was one guy with his arm in a makeshift sling, and another with a bloody cut above his eye. No small children with their heads stuck in saucepans, which was a shame. Considering it was such a cliché, Gwen didn’t think she’d ever seen it. Carry On films had a lot to answer for.
No drunks, either. It was still too early in the evening for that. Come midnight and the place would reek of beer and sweat. People would be slumped against walls and lying on the stained carpet tiles.
Beside her, Rhys was leaning back in his seat, eyes closed, tea towel still held to his cheek. It was maroon all over now, and sopping wet with the condensation from the pack of frozen peas.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked for the hundredth time. She wished she could think of something more original, something sensitive and caring, but that was all that came to mind.